Why Is Eddie Murphy in Cinematic Exile?

Bruce Beresford’s repugnant “Mr. Church,” starring Eddie Murphy, turns one of the great black performers of the time into a sanitized symbol of acceptable blackness.

PHOTOGRAPH BY CINELOU RELEASING / EVERETT

It’s the year of the national gaslighting, and a movie that runs on a similar miasma of racist lies is now in theatres. It’s called “Mr. Church,” and it was directed by Bruce Beresford, whose only excuse is that he was (ir)responsible for making “Driving Miss Daisy,” in 1989, and his ideas about race are stuck in 1948. Eddie Murphy stars in “Mr. Church”—and it’s not his fault. Murphy is one of the performing geniuses of the era and doesn’t need an excuse. It’s impossible to know what personal needs or desires, pressures or practicalities the project gratified. In a recent interview, Murphy said, “It was like a really easy movie to go do, and everybody was really cool, so I just went and did it, then I went back to the hammock in the back yard." Artists often do ungratifying work because they need the money, because they aren’t receiving many offers, or even because a role, however thinly written or conceived, sparks something in their imagination or their inspiration that they want to nourish or develop or test.

Murphy, one of the funniest people in the world, and in the business (even if he’s hardly been prominent in the business lately), is the victim of a critical assassination. His most personal work, “Norbit,” a psychodramatic outpouring of bile, pain, conflict, and sheer comedic invention, which Murphy starred in and wrote, deserved to be hailed as a masterwork. Instead, critics treated it like a plague. It’s hard to imagine the effect that the tin-eared, hard-hearted, grotesquely oblivious reviews had on Murphy, who, despite the brazenness of his comic persona, may well be as sensitive to public insults as any sentient human. The savaging hasn’t helped his career, either; in the same recent interview, he said, “I don’t usually get offered stuff.”

As a result, since then, he has done nothing of any significance, including the conceptual comedy “Meet Dave,” which has a few bits of inspired lunacy based on the notion that one of the characters played by Murphy has no idea how to act human, and “A Thousand Words,” in which Murphy's character is punished and silenced for his mercenary bravado. The pathos of his comedic impulse is undiminished; the energy is stifled; the will has perhaps been defeated, I hope only temporarily.

Here’s how Murphy is muffled in “Mr. Church.” The action, set in Los Angeles, starts in 1971. Murphy plays the title character, a former cook for a rich man who died. That former employer’s ex-lover, Marie Brooks (Natascha McElhone), is dying of breast cancer and has six months to live. The rich man bequeathed a lifetime salary to Mr. Church, on the condition that he cook for Marie and her ten-year-old daughter, Charlie (Natalie Coughlin), until Marie’s death. But Marie, miraculously, lives six years, and Mr. Church becomes a part of the Brooks family. Then, a few years later, when the young-adult Charlie (Britt Robertson) comes home from college pregnant and becomes a single mother, like her own mother was, she moves in with Mr. Church, who becomes her virtual father.

The film’s screenwriter, Susan McMartin, has said that Murphy’s character is based on a real-life Mr. Church-like character who played an important role in her own life. I wonder about the distortions arising from each successive phase of the depiction, from the actual person to McMartin’s perception of him, from that perception to the writing, and from the writing to the film’s realization. I’d bet that something essential has been lost along the way.

Who is the movie’s Mr. Church? He’s the strong, silent type; his dignity is unassailable; his formality, politeness, and reserve are ironclad; his patience is endless; his devotion is boundless; his service is unreserved and unquestioning; and his talents—literary, musical, artistic—are formidable. He’s at the Brooks household with elaborate breakfasts cooked before Charlie wakes up for school. He’s in their home tidying up long past dinner, then sneaks off for what he considers his private time, about which he brooks no questions.

But Charlie finds out: Mr. Church hangs out at a disreputable bar called Jelly’s Place, where, as it turns out, he’s the highly esteemed house pianist. It also turns out that Mr. Church had a rough childhood, and his long-standing positions in the employ of white families fill the hole in his soul that his own family life left behind. The real point of “Mr. Church” is to create a black man whom white people can embrace unreservedly: he’s perfectly nurturing yet absolutely vulnerable, totally dependable yet completely dependent, endowed with astonishing artistic talents that he’s content to deploy with no expectation of earning a living, and intent on throwing himself into his day job with selfless fervor. What’s more, Mr. Church’s old-school formality seems itself like a vestige of what, in “Strange Fruit,” is sardonically called the “gallant South,” as he ends every sentence to Marie with “ma’am,” as if conditioned by subjugation and fear.

The idea that (as the film suggests) a musician of Mr. Church’s caliber would avoid not just the limelight but a life in music—that he wouldn’t teach, wouldn’t record, wouldn’t tour, wouldn’t form a band, wouldn’t live an artistic life but, instead, would remain grateful for the crumbs of time that are left for his self-expression, while spending the rest of his hours as other people’s physical and emotional factotum—is, at the very least, in need of dramatic consideration, which the movie never offers. The character of Mr. Church is a textbook example of what Spike Lee has called the Magical Negro, a desexualized, depersonalized, subordinated, vitiated black person who fixes white lives while keeping his black cred—Mr. Church’s nights at Jelly’s are, in effect, the recharging of the black battery with which he powers the Brookses’ lives.

“Mr. Church” is a repugnant film. It’s repugnant for its dehumanizing view (however unintentionally so) of a black man, and repugnant for its emptying-out of one of the great black performers of the time into a sanitized symbol of acceptable blackness. The question isn’t how white filmmakers can decide to make such a film—Beresford has, after all, made “Driving Miss Daisy”—or even why Murphy has participated in the film and given it his all; it’s why Murphy hasn’t made a comedy lately, or anything of any substance.

In part, it’s because critics have derailed Murphy’s comedy career. And that has happened partly because comedy has changed in the past decade. Murphy, who’s a mere fifty-five years old, is a vestige of another age of comedy, a far more freewheeling and anarchic one—an age of crueller comedy that depended as much on the id as on the superego. “Norbit” was widely reviled for its caricatures; little attention was paid to Murphy’s own self-caricature, to his own confessional sense of weakness and of evil, of oblivious self-interest and awkward sentiment, of the desire and capacity for utter otherness. I was, frankly, shocked by Murphy’s portrayal of an elderly Chinese character, Mr. Wong—but all the more shocked because I didn’t realize, until midway through the film, that the character of Mr. Wong was, in fact, being portrayed by Murphy. His performance as Rasputia, an abusive spouse who is obese, was criticized for its mockery of a fat person, though the portrayal emphasized, painfully, the character’s cruelty and indifference. (The name alone suggests that she’s a caricature of evil incarnate.) Rasputia’s actions and attitudes, not her physique, render her repellent and ridiculous.

This is an age of rational and moral comedy, and Murphy hasn’t reconfigured his comedic performances to the new tone (even though he daringly and frankly stated his stern principles on the biggest stage of all, the Oscars, in 1988). Murphy, like Jerry Lewis, has gone out of fashion. Lewis was overwhelmed by the sixties—by changing styles and changing subjects, by the irony, politics, sarcasm, camp, and verbal humor of Groucho Marxist ideology—and didn’t direct any movies released between 1970 and 1981. The last film that Lewis, now ninety, has directed, to date, is “Cracking Up,” released in 1983, when he was fifty-seven. But Murphy—whose talents are manifold and who’s a great actor as well as a great comedian—hasn’t found the filmmaker to make substantial use of his art, hasn’t found the Martin Scorsese for his own “The King of Comedy” or, for that matter, the Wes Anderson or the Sofia Coppola for his own dramatic rebirth, such as Bill Murray’s in “Rushmore” and “Lost in Translation.”

Like Murphy, Lewis has always had a sentimental side as well as a dramatic one. Like Murphy, Lewis has taken on earnest projects that have brought him nothing but grief. (In Lewis’s case, the prime example is the movie in his closet, “The Day the Clown Cried,” from 1972.) Unlike Lewis, Murphy hasn’t directed himself (at least, not since 1989). But, like Murphy, Lewis is also the star of a newly released film—“Max Rose,” which opened earlier this month. (It was shot in 2013.) It’s worth contrasting the veteran Beresford’s wan and impersonal approach to Murphy in “Mr. Church” with the relatively inexperienced Daniel Noah’s direction of “Max Rose.”

That film is no masterwork. Lewis plays the title role, an elderly jazz musician who, soon after the death of his wife (played, in flashback, by Claire Bloom), suspects that she had a secret life—a lover—and sets out to investigate. Noah, who also wrote the script, doesn’t do much better with Max’s musical life than Beresford does with Mr. Church’s. But Noah does two superb things that utterly elude Beresford. First, he dramatizes Max’s rages—mainly targeting Max’s son, Chris (Kevin Pollak)—with a terrifying acerbity. (Mr. Church has a few moments of anger, too, but they’re kept down and distanced.) At times, it’s as if the motivating passion of the aged Max’s survival is to berate and diminish his son. Max is no angel, except when he chooses to be one, as he is with his adored and adoring granddaughter, Chris’s daughter, Annie (Kerry Bishé).

Noah draws the lines in Max’s character crudely and sharply, but starkly and vigorously. Above all, he directs the film as if he knows that there’s nothing in his script, nothing in his conception of the characters, nothing in the drama that’s as complex, as important, and as fascinating as Jerry Lewis himself. So Noah films Lewis in extended closeups, even of him doing nothing, that approach him like an idol, a fury in repose, and a national treasure. Those still closeups deliver more passion and more experience, more contained vitality and volcanic smolder, than does the churning action of many entire dramas.

By contrast, in “Mr. Church,” Beresford pushes Murphy fully into character. The director films the script thoroughly and, with an earnest obliviousness, not only fails to see the ugly meaning of the action but also fails to see the performer—or, rather, the person—who’s in front of the camera.

Lewis, even in his heyday, may have been despised and reviled by sniffy intellectuals in the United States, but, well, he always had Paris. As the director and star of his own films, he was recognized as the genius he is by the people who understood more about the art of movies than anyone in the world, France’s cinephilic critics and filmmakers. It seems tragic that Murphy hasn’t got the recognition that he deserves; that he hasn’t taken to the comprehensive art of filmmaking and directed himself; that other directors of his time, and the best of them, haven’t joined forces with him on projects of artistic renewal. But Murphy is only fifty-five; I hope that there will be lots of time—and that his own untimeliness, the very mark of art, will itself become the engine of his art.

_*Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly said that Eddie Murphy never directed himself in a film. _